US President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed legislation making lynching a federal hate crime, admitting how racial violence has left a lasting scar on the country and declaring that these acts are not a relic of a bygone period.

During a signing ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, President Biden did not mince words in detailing the history of racial violence against Black Americans and its continuing impact.

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He said, “Lynching was pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone … belongs in America, not everyone is created equal. Terror, to systematically undermine hard-fought civil rights. Terror, not just in the dark of the night but in broad daylight. Innocent men, women and children hung by nooses in trees, bodies burned and drowned and castrated.”

“Their crimes? Trying to vote. Trying to go to school. Trying to own a business or preach the gospel. False accusations of murder, arson and robbery. Simply being Black,” he continued.

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The Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022, which Biden signed into law, is named after a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who was brutally murdered by a group of White men in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a White woman. His assassination aroused national outcry and served as a fuel for the burgeoning civil rights movement.

Lynching was a terror tactic utilised against Black Americans, especially in the racially divided South. According to Tuskegee University, which collects lynching records, 4,743 persons were lynched between 1882 and 1968, with 3,446 of them being Black.

Considering the “unwritten rules” of behaviour The President stated that Till’s mother passed on to her son “That same admonition — too many Black parents still have to use that. They have to tell their children that when it comes to encounters with law enforcement.”

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Biden stated that the new rule “isn’t just about the past,” referring to the murder of a 25-year-old Black man on a jog and a 2017 Virginia rally of White racists and White nationalists that resulted in the death of a counterprotester and the injury of hundreds more.

“From the bullets in the back of Ahmaud Arbery to countless other acts of violence, countless victims known and unknown, the same racial hatred that drove the mob to hang a noose brought that mob carrying torches out of the fields of Charlottesville just a few years ago — racial hate isn’t an old problem. It’s a persistent problem,” he emphasized.

For more than a century, advocates have worked to establish federal anti-lynching legislation.

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Representative Bobby Rush of Illinois, who introduced the bill that was signed into law on Tuesday, also introduced a similar version of his current bill in 2019. The House passed the bill the following year, but Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, blocked it due to worries that it was too broad. Earlier this month, Paul declared his support for the latest version of the plan.

And, as a senator, Vice President Kamala Harris, New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, and South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott filed legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime. Late last year, the Senate passed the Justice for Lynching Victims Act.